Before Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Mark Millar, Dave McKean, Warren Ellis, Glenn Fabry, Steve Dillon, Grant Morrison, Dave Gibbons and all the other UK creators who have had a disproportionate impact on the US comic book scene, there was Windsor-Smith. The reason that anyone is prepared to wait that long for it is the 71-year-old behind it. In an industry that has, for most of its history, been dominated by fast art and on-the-hoof storytelling, owing to the ferocious pace of weekly production, to call Monsters an outlier would be an understatement. I want to say to him: “Two days? Try 35 years!” For that is how long the world has waited for Barry Windsor-Smith’s new graphic novel, Monsters. Monsters is surely one of the most intense graphic novels ever drawn.H ow long would you wait for a comic? My 10-year-old son, staking out the letterbox (“Dad! My Beano still hasn’t arrived!”) has a limit of about 48 hours. There are passages of heartbreaking tenderness, of excruciating pain, of redemption and sacrifice, and devastating violence. Monsters is rendered in Barry Windsor-Smith's impeccable pen-and-ink technique, the visual storytelling, with its sensitivity to gesture and composition, the most sophisticated of the artist's career. A 360-page tour de force of visual storytelling, Monsters' narrative canvas is copious: part familial drama, part thriller, part metaphysical journey, it is an intimate portrait of individuals struggling to reclaim their lives and an epic political odyssey that plays across two generations of American history. As the monsters of the title multiply, becoming real and metaphorical, the story reaches a crescendo of moral reckoning. Bailey's only ally and protector, Sergeant McFarland, intervenes, which sets off a chain of cascading events that spin out of everyone's control. Secretive, damaged, innocent, trying to forget a past and looking for a future, Bobby is the perfect candidate for a secret US government experiment, an unholy continuation of a genetics program that was discovered in Nazi Germany nearly 20 years earlier in the waning days of World War II. Bailey doesn't realize he is about to fulfil his tragic destiny when he walks into a US Army recruitment office.
35 YEARS IN THE MAKING: THE MOST ANTICIPATED GRAPHIC NOVEL IN RECENT HISTORY The year is 1964.
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